


work it out with your fingers

by nephropsis



Category: Blazing Saddles (1974)
Genre: Absurdism, M/M, a wild stab at historical context, fourth fifth and sixth wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 05:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8736013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nephropsis/pseuds/nephropsis
Summary: It’s a common misconception that Jim is from Waco.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wotwotleigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wotwotleigh/gifts).



It’s a common misconception that Jim is from Waco.

Oh, it’s not one he goes out of his way to correct. Nice enough town, Waco, if you squint and don’t mind dust in your eyes, and if you enjoy gunfights, whiskey and loose women. Jim’s okay on two out of three. Gunfights and whiskey suit him just fine. Thing is, there’s only so many gunfights a man can survive, and that’s just a fact. He’s been a little flexible with them on occasion, but hey, who in the business hasn’t. Besides, a man gets shot in the ass, he’s entitled to embellish his stories a little, especially nowadays.

Speaking of nowadays, we should probably establish that ‘nowadays’ is sometime after the great western expansion and sometime before the moving film camera, and Jim in his youth had been rather taken with the pioneer spirit until the spirits got ahead of him. But maybe we should go back a little further, for narrative integrity.

Jim, lately The Waco Kid, hasn’t always been Jim and isn’t strictly speaking from Waco.

Presently, Jim is from nowhere much, and going nowhere special, which suits him just fine.

- 

“Man,” Bart says early one fine spring morning as he stretches out of his bedroll and treats Jim to a wonderful view of his smooth, dark brown skin and perfect spine, “I ain’t never taken you for a morning person." 

“Oh,” Jim drawls, toasting the dawn with his heels up on a rock, “there’s still plenty you don’t know about me.” 

Bart takes the morning’s nearly empty bottle of whiskey and takes a swig, lips just where Jim’s were. Jim watches, a hitch in his breath that he should be used to by now, wondering idly what it would feel like without the bottle in the way, as the vector of the touch. That’s been the challenge, historically, for Jim when it comes to Bart, with his long clever fingers and his bright clever eyes and his slow, mocking tongue.

“Oh?” Bart says, eyebrows rising, smile a hint at the corners of his mouth. “Enlighten me.”

“Wanna play a game?”

Bart grins, stoppering the bottle and tucking it into his pack. “You ever get tired of those?”

“Never.” That’s the problem. Well, one of them.

-

Jim is eight years old the first time he kisses another boy. Samuel Kurtzman is a little bigger than him, a little neater, a little better at everything, and Jim follows him one day after temple and challenges him to a game of marbles while their fathers are debating, then pecks him on the lips as his prize when Jim wins round after round with unerring aim.

“Jacob!” Samuel says, jerking back, “I--”

“I won,” Jim tells him, matter-of-fact. “That means I get to choose the prize.”

“It doesn’t work like that!” Samuel huffs, finger on his lips. “How’d a runt like you get so good at marbles, anyway?”

Jim shrugs. “A natural inclination towards narrative devices.”

“What?”

“Just lucky, I guess.” He smiles, close lipped.

“Yeah well,” Samuel says, pulling away, “don’t do it again.”

Jim makes no promises, as a general rule. They’re trouble, and besides, he doesn’t think it’s really fair of Samuel to ask him never to kiss anyone again. He oughtta be more specific. “I won’t,” Jim lies, because he isn’t ever going to kiss Samuel Kurtzman again, but he doesn’t think he’s going to stop wanting to.

-

“What in all of god’s green earth is ‘twenty questions’?” Bart asks, his horse picking its way over the scrub grass somewhere west of Colorado and north of Mexico.

Jim thinks he can see the edges of the backdrop, but that might also just be the shimmer of heat on the horizon. It’s always so hard to tell, and they haven’t hit a tollbooth for miles, so they might really be off the lot.

“Well,” Jim starts, “I think of something and you have to guess what it is.”

“Sounds like I’m supposed to read your mind,” he says, sitting sideways in the saddle and letting his horse do what horses do, namely take a shit while walking and stop every so often to eat whatever takes her fancy. “I know I’m a creature of dazzling intellect, but I’m a little rusty on the mind reading.”

“That’s why you get twenty questions.” Jim has pulled out a flask for the occasion, delighted that Bart wants to play along. “I’ll think of a person, place or thing and that’s all you get to know before you start guessing.”

“We should have packed a chess set,” Bart says, as his horse stops dead in her tracks, nearly pitching him over her neck as she attempts to eat a cactus. Bart recovers with his usual grace, swinging a leg back over the saddle with a grin. “Race you to that grand piano?”

“I wish they’d stop leaving them in the sun.” Jim despairs, sometimes. Often, in fact, as the consequence of a choleric personality and an excess of drink. “They warp.”

Bart has already taken off, a whoop of joy swallowed by the desert. Jim watches him for a while before he tries to catch up, enjoying the sight of him too much to want to break it by concentrating on not falling off. There weren’t many horses in New York when he was growing up, and much like playing the piano, it’s better to start early.

When they reach the piano there’s a man playing a saloon tune out of key, and he looks up when Jim skids to a stop next to Bart. “Hello fellas,” he says. “Any requests?”

“Nah,” Bart says, “long as we ain’t goin’ in circles, we’re happy.” 

“Oh, I’ve never seen you before,” the piano player shrugs, playing a roll. “I believe I’d have remembered such a finely dressed gentleman as yourself.”

Bart beams. “See?” He elbows Jim, grinning at him, “style isn’t dead.”

“How far to Nevada?” Jim asks, feeling the lightness of his pack.

“Oh, until you work out your tension in isolation, I’d say,” the piano player says, squinting at the horizon. “Or you could take a shortcut through Universal. Try not to get lost, though, they’re rearranging.”

Bart thanks him and the piano plays them out. By the time Jim realises Bart is heading for the backlot it’s too late to stop, and suddenly the chaos of a song-and-dance number engulfs them. Jim breaks into a canter as someone yells _GOD DAMN IT! CUT! WHO LET THE DAMN COWBOYS IN AGAIN?_ and then they’re clattering onto the main lot, scattering people in all directions.

Bart pulls abreast with him as they’re riding across the lawn of something Victorian, grass muffling the hoofbeats of their horses. “I figured we could grab some booze before we got back on the road,” he says, smiling slightly. He links his arm with Jim’s, leaning into him for a second before a woman in a long white dress shrieks at them and dives into a pond.

“White people,” Bart sighs, rolling his eyes.

“It’s a place,” Jim tells him, unable to stop grinning. “Now you get to ask questions.”

-

Jacob Adler was never going to be a rabbi, or a doctor, or a lawyer. At best he was going to be a grocer like his father, but fate had other plans. For one thing, too much imagination is as much a curse as it is a blessing, and Jim has an abundance of it. At ten he’s already taking potshots in the vacant lots of lower Manhattan for money, because he’s never missed yet, and with plenty of brothers ahead of him, nobody really pays him much mind when he’s not around.

Getting kidnapped probably isn’t something most children would just roll along with, but in Jim’s defense, getting technically kidnapped by a circus is pretty much the ideal situation for a kid with a talent, seven siblings and a melancholy outlook. It really isn’t so bad, and Jim’s always wanted to get out of New York. It just seems like a good idea.

The Waco kid is born when Jim is fourteen, passing through Kentucky on their way southwest, and the circus-master decides Jim needs more of an act to go with his skill. He’s never been to Waco, and he’s a little offended to be called a kid when he personally considers himself jaded and mature, but hey, it’s a living.

Also appealing is Jeremy Cheng, three years older and significantly more flexible than Jim, from a large family of flexible people who disapprove of Jim on principle but can’t stop teenage boys from sneaking away in their costumes, Jim in his ill-fitting hat and ridiculous boots and Jeremy in his paint and flowing shirt after a show. 

Sometimes Jim thinks about New York, but mostly he thinks about how he’s going to flip the lid on the jar he’s shooting and how he’s going to get Jeremy to make that noise he made the first time Jim scraped his teeth over the lowest vertebra of his neck.

Jeremy introduces him to whiskey, and Jim discovers the second great love of his life, and mostly things are good.

Jim shoots the hat off the Mayor of Louisville the next morning, and they get run out of town in fine form. Jeremy laughs loudly, with his head tipped all the way back, and says “hell, Jim, you’re something else, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Jim says, tasting rye on the top of a wagon once the dust has settled, his ankles tangled in Jeremy’s long legs. “I’m the Waco Kid.”

-

“Is it Rock Ridge?”

“Oh come on,” Jim says, slow and even, happy with the weight of Bart’s legs thrown across his thighs, a fire crackling merrily before them now they’re back on the road to Nowhere Special. “I know you to be a devious, cunning, exceptionally bright man of the law, and your first guess is Rock Ridge?”

“If I may speak in my own defense,” Bart says, “this is a game without a lot of rules.”

“Try again.”

“Fine, fine. If you insist.”

“I do.”

“Is it a big city?”

“It is.”

“Is it a real place?”

“Oh, that depends who you’re asking.”

Bart grins at him, white teeth standing out stark in the firelight. “I’m asking you.”

“I suppose it must be. It’s where I’m from.”

Bart’s grin widens. “Waco.”

Jim rests a hand on his shin. “Try again.”

Bart sits up, folding in half to peer more closely at Jim’s face, and he feels himself slipping into a lazy smile in response. “Wait,” Bart says. “You mean to tell me that all this time you’ve been calling yourself The Waco Kid and you ain’t even from Waco?”

“That’s five questions,” Jim tells him, “keep going.”

“Only if you answer it!”

“Yes.” Jim pulls the cork on a new bottle with his teeth and runs a hand further up Bart’s leg. He drinks before offering it to Bart. “Go on.”

“So you are not, nor have you ever have been, from Waco, Texas. What about Houston? No, wait, I got it. You and Doc Holliday, Georgia brethren.” Jim takes back the bottle and Bart looks at him with mock despair in his wide eyes. “I knew we should have packed a chess set.”

“If you get it right, then it’s your turn, and I get to guess.”

Bart thinks for a moment, leaning back on his elbows, but failing to discourage Jim’s hand on his leg. “Is it where we’re going?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.” Jim hasn’t thought about the possibility of going back to New York. Once, after he got shot in the ass, he’d considered it, but a man comes crawling home drunk after being shot in the ass and leaving with the circus and he risks a lot of rather inconvenient questions. Besides, what’s an outlaw to do in the seat of law and order? “No, I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“It’s back East, then?”

“Yes.”

Bart lays down on the red dirt, legs still thrown over Jim’s lap in a rather distracting fashion. Alcohol is the devil's’ drink, of course, but shared with a friend of such esteem as Bart, Jim thinks he is justified in partaking. It seems less like an avenue to the fastest possible grave now, and as such Jim is slowly rediscovering pleasure. Tragically, a sensualist streak is never helped by anticipation, and oh, he wants to rest a hand on the strip of skin between the bottom of Bart’s soft suede shirt and the burnished silver of his belt buckle where it hangs suspended between the peaks of his hips. He wants it badly, a new feeling still half-remembered from before, when Jim was living in bars from joy and not necessity, using his talents for shooting and his talents for other things with equal abandon.

“I’m also from back East,” he says, looking up at Jim with his hands tucked behind his head. “I ever tell you that?”

“I have been very drunk for much of our acquaintance, so you may as well tell me again.” Jim likes the sound of Bart’s voice, measured and smooth and prone to peaking when he’s excited. 

“Parents were freed in eighteen-sixty-five,” Bart says, smiling half a smile.

Jim waits for him to keep talking, but he doesn’t. “A toast,” he says after a while, “to brave travellers.”

Bart laughs, his whole body relaxed, half entrusted to Jim’s virtue. “Is it New York?”

“It is.”

Bart looks up at him, somehow looking dignified despite his sprawl. “Do I win a prize?”

Jim makes a show of considering. “Less than twenty questions? I can offer a kiss.”

Bart lazily extends a hand and Jim pulls him up again, setting aside the barely-touched bottle to better hold up his end of the deal, and the better to feel the play of muscle along the fine bones of Bart’s ribs as he breathes.

Jim presses his lips to Bart’s with as much care as he can muster, which honestly isn’t much, but Bart just laughs and sweeps Jim’s hat off his head, the better to take a grip of his hair.

Later, when Bart’s shirt is on a cactus, lending it a comically human affect, and when Jim’s drawers are being used as a temporary pillow, Bart looks over at him and says “I take it back. When you were first a guest under my roof we should’a screwed right away.”

“That would have ruined the narrative tension, don’t you think?” Jim asks, lazily circling a finger over Bart’s chest.

“I suppose a man does thrive on mystery,” Bart concedes, resting his head on Jim’s shoulder.

-

Jim is actually in Deadwood when he gets shot. He’s missed most of the fun, but isn’t there for anything but something like protection. A town full of gunslingers is a good place for a gunslinger to go if he’s a little bit on the wrong side of the law.

It’s possible, if apocryphal, that Jim has shot a man in a duel. Of course, it’s equally possible he’s still alive, but Jim didn’t stay in Waco long enough to find out. In fact, he shot a man over something rather unsettlingly mundane and stole a horse, and now Deadwood has embraced him with all its two-dimensional pleasures, and Jim is making a living the way he always has.

He can trick shoot the wings off a fly, but would rather not. 

The thing about the circus is it’s a play, an elaborate show designed to create a little perpendicular world for the spectators, but Jim has always had a tenuous grip on the line between fiction and reality in a physical sense. He has a fine sense for truth, but truth and reality are not remotely the same thing.

So, it’s true that the day Jim shot a sheriff in Tennessee he was in the right, after catching the man in a drunk, angry mood and itching for a fight with a young man half his size but with twice his speed on the draw. But it’s reality that when the sheriff of Somewhere, TN happened upon Jim in the saloon making eyes at the piano player he took it the wrong way and made an ill-advised challenge to a person quite equipped to kill him.

Jim hasn’t quite reconciled to the title of murderer yet when he leaves the circus in a rush, and waves goodbye to a life that has suited him well until the two little realities of performance intersected with a bullet.

It’s true that Jim wasn’t in the wrong, but it’s reality that he’s on the run now.

As with most things, he finds himself quite well aware that this is the midpoint of an arc, but the problem is that being a duellist begets duels, and duels beget other duels, until the begetting of them falls out of his hands and he falls face-first into a bottle with a bullet in his ass.

It’s not glamorous, being a drunk, even if Jim can recognise that one day all this will make sense. Drifting seems to be the thing to do, when one is adrift.

He never feels less glamorous than in his first upside-down glimpse of Bart, who, even though he’s as stranded in Rock Ridge as Jim himself, carries himself with purpose. Jim has always admired purpose. He’s never had any spare for himself.

-

“What if we went somewhere special?” Bart asks, when they’re heading towards the horizon again. “Nowhere is getting a touch passe for my refined tastes.”

“Oh?” Jim smiles at him. “Where did you have in mind?”

“You get twenty questions,” Bart says, smiling back. “I’m sure a quick-witted sophisticate such as yourself can make a guess.”

“Is it New York?”

“No. Try again.”

“Thank goodness,” Jim says, “for a second you had me worried.”

Bart sweeps an arm out at the vast, red-brown expanse of what might be Utah again, or might just be a particularly good painting of a sunset-lit evening in the West. “I’ve an inkling that one of us thrives on mischief,” he says. “How does an adventure sound?”

“Like an excellent idea,” Jim says, “is it visible to the naked eye?”

“Depends how naked,” Bart says, grinning.

Jim grins back. Somewhere along the way they’ve finished the whiskey, and Jim has only just noticed. He finds that he doesn’t care as much as he thought he might. “Lead the way, Sheriff.”

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell I love this movie? I love this movie. 
> 
> Find me on tumblr later if you enjoy that jaded snake person #aesthetic.


End file.
